Sunday, September 30, 2012

Njera

How to Make Njera
Start with some teff, a tiny Ethiopian grain and pound it furiously in a stone mortar until you have flour. Or you can buy teff flour. Any good health food store will have both. Put about a cup of the flour in a bowl and add water until you have a smooth batter. Cover with a towel. The next day add a little more teff flour and water. Continue for one week adding more each morning. It will be sour and smell funky. Next heat a very large non stick skillet and generously daub with butter. Make sure your batter is quite thin, add a pinch of salt too. Pour in about a cup of batter and swirl around so the entire pan is evenly covered. It will hiss and sizzle and little holes will appear. Cover the pan briefly to steam through. You don't need to turn it over or flip, just carefully remove with a spaluta and set aside on a platter. It will be nice and tart and chewy. On top you put little piles of stewed lentils, spicy stewed chicken (doro wat) and cauliflower or okra. Anything. You eat by tearing off little bits of the njera and picking up mouthfuls of the food.

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Ken, might you know whether it is the brown teff or ivory teff that is traditionally used in Ethiopia to make njera? Is one grain considered more ordinary than the other and used for fast days, etc, or might there be regional cultivation of brown versus ivory teff?

Many thanks for any additional info on the uses of teff varieties you could offer, Anna

Food A Cultural Culinary History

About Me

Food Historian at the University of the Pacific. Director of Food Studies in San Francisco.
Author of Eating Right in the Renaissance, Food in Early Modern Europe, Cooking in Europe 1250-1650, The Banquet, Beans (2008 IACP Jane Grigson Award) and Pancake. A cookbook with Rosanna Nafziger THE LOST ART OF REAL COOKING.
Coeditor of The Lord's Supper with Trudy Eden and Editor of A Cultural History of Food: The Renaissance.
Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia (4 vols.) Three World Cuisines: Italian, Mexican and Chinese recently won the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards Best Foreign Cuisine book in the World. The Routledge International Handbook to Food Studies is in print.
A sequel to the cookbook - entitled THE LOST ARTS OF HEARTH AND HOME.
Latest Books: Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food from Oregon State U Press, a little book on Nuts from Reaktion and The Food History Reader from Bloomsbury. The Most Excellent Book of Cookery (translation of a 16th c. French Cookbook with Tim Tomasik) from Prospect Books. Not to mention THE BEAST: The Food Issues Encyclopedia for Sage. Still in the works.